Patience!

A problem familiar to anyone involved in learning Pirkei Avot today is that of coming up with a translation that both does justice to the original text and makes it relevant to contemporary readers.  This problem is particularly troublesome with abstract nouns that describe human qualities.

“Patience” is a good example. There is no doubt that the sages of the Mishnah valued patience in their time just as highly, if not more so, than we do today. However, there is no word in the vocabulary of the Tanach, the Mishnah or Midrash that appears to correspond precisely with that value as we understand it today. The use of word סבלנות (savlanut) in Ivrit today when referring to patience is a modern usage; its etymology carries overtones of putting up with a load rather than with biding one’s time while one seeks or awaits a hoped-for outcome.   

Does patience feature in Pirkei Avot among the qualities a Jew should seek to acquire and practise? Writing in Eternal Ethics from Sinai, Rabbi Yaakov Hillel discusses the requirement that judges be “deliberate in judgment” (Avot 1:1) and adds:

“There is another element to being deliberate in judgment. Our Sages tell us that patience is one of the forty-eight means through which Torah is acquired [Avot 6:6]. Patience in Torah study means allowing every topic the time and unrushed, in-depth learning required for full comprehension”.

This suggests that patience is part of being “deliberate in judgment”. But where in Avot 6:6 does patience appear? A survey of popular English translations of Avot 6:6 suggests that, in two of the most popular of them (ArtScroll and Chabad.org), patience is not listed among the 48 elements of Torah acquisition at all.

Among those translations in which patience is listed, Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks and Paltiel Birnbaum both use “patience” as a translation of אֶֽרֶךְ אַפַּֽיִם (erech apayim), although this term is more commonly translated as “slow to anger”. These translators are consistent within Avot in so far as they use the same translation in Avot 5:2 and 5:3 to describe God’s attitude towards two sequences of sinful generations, but both translate the same term as “slow to anger” when used elsewhere in their prayerbooks (at Shemot 34:6-7).

Two non-Jewish scholars (Herbert Danby and R. Travis Herford) translate erech apayim as “long suffering”. This actually supports the “erech apayim is patience” theory because the word “suffering” has itself changed meaning. In the 19^th and early 20^th century it was common for “suffer” to bear the meaning of “allow” or “tolerate”. It is this nuance that may have led Irving M. Bunim (Ethics from Sinai, vol 3) to render the term “long-suffering patience”.

So far we have seen that the virtue of patience may be a subset of being deliberate in judgment or as an alternative rendering of “slow to anger”. But might Avot have more to say on the subject?

There is a Baraita at 6:1 which lists 29 elements that pertain to a sincere and committed Torah scholar. One of these is that the scholar should be erech ru’ach (literally “long-spirited”). How do we render “long-spirited” into English today? While there is no actual consensus, one gets the impression that “patient” is the most popular option: Rabbi Sacks, Paltiel Birnbaum, Chabad.org and some ArtScroll publications offer “patient” (others prefer “long suffering”). This was not however the way earlier commentators understood the term: both Rabbenu Yonah and the commentary attributed to Rashi take erech ru’ach to be a synonym for erech apayim and warn of the danger of losing one’s temper, while the text of Avot on which the Maharal based his Derech Chaim seems to have read erech apayim and not erech ru’ach. The Abarbanel (Nachalat Avot) treats the term as being part of the overall concept of modesty and humility.

It seems to me that Avot, like much of the Mishnah, often speaks in terms of actual instances rather than general principles. Thus at Avot 5:9 we learn of the seven attributes of the chacham, the wise person, whom we contrast with the golem, someone whose behaviour remains unpolished.  Two of the seven attributes offer practical examples of (im)patience: a person should not interrupt others while they are speaking and should not answer questions off the cuff but should think before answering. From this wise counsel we can begin to construct a principle that one should be patient. Indeed, Rabbi Menachem Mordechai Frankel-Teumim appears to be edging towards something like this in his Be’er Ha’Avot when, commenting on erech ru’ach in Avot 6:1, the two examples he brings are those of Avot 5:9: not interrupting someone while they are asking you a question and not rushing to give an answer.

So, to summarise, “patience” definitely seems to be lurking within the body of Avot. But to work out exactly where is a task that takes a fair bit of … patience.