Acts of kindness: how the Torah records an upgrade

I am currently perusing the first volume of Avot Lebanim: Shiurim beMasechet Avot, compiled from the teachings of the late and much-loved Rabbi Chaim Druckman. This volume, published by Or Etzion in 2019, is a pleasure to behold: the print is clear and spaced out well on the page; the Hebrew is accessible to the non-scholar and the content is of a warm, conciliatory nature rather than in-your-face confrontational mussar.

Like many Avot commentaries, this one opens by asking why this tractate is named Avot (“Fathers”) in the first place. Out of the many answers given over the centuries Rabbi Druckman highlights six, one of which is that the chapters deal with Avot leshmirat haTorah (loosely translatable as “main headings for keeping the Torah”). By way of an example he picks a teaching of Rabbi Elazar ben Azariah (Avot 3:21), “Im en Torah en derech eretz, ve’im derech eretz en Torah” (meaning here “If there is no Torah, there is no basic standard of good behaviour there is no Torah, but if there is no basic level of good behaviour, there is no Torah”—though this can be translated and understood in several other ways).  

According to Rabbi Druckman, the significance of this maxim can be illustrated by reference to three of the greatest and most righteous personalities in the Bible: Noah, Abraham and Moses.

Noah, described in the Torah as being “righteous in his generations” and therefore as being worthy to be saved when almost all other forms of life were to be wiped out, carried out God’s instructions to the letter. He did exactly what God told him; not more and not less. This is itself an extraordinary achievement and should not be denigrated. But Noah could have done more. He saved his wife, his three sons and their wives but made no attempt to dissuade God from His destructive intent or to save anyone else.

Abraham, the first person in the Torah to establish an ongoing relationship with God and to partner with Him in bringing awareness of the deity to an idol-worshipping world, was also confronted with God’s destructive intentions when he was informed of God’s plan to wipe out Sodom, Gomorrah and the other cities nearby where the level of interpersonal evil and immorality had reached an intolerable level. There, daring to argue with God, Abraham seeks to avert this dire decree if 50, 45, 40, 30, 20 or even 10 good folk can be found in the destruction zone. But Abraham could have done more. He could have pressed God to spare all the inhabitants of the condemned plain, but he only argued that God should not kill the righteous together with the wicked.

Moses, who led the Children of Israel through good times and bad for some four decades, was also faced with an angry God who stated His intent to wipe out the backsliding nation of newly-emancipated slaves and start the Jewish people afresh with Moses himself. Moses did not hesitate to press God to spare the entire nation despite the episode of the golden calf, thus seeking to save both the righteous and those who manifestly were not.

Noah, Abraham, Moses—all three were remarkable men, whose standards greatly exceeded the behavioural norms of their day and whose influence we still feel even millennia after their deaths. Abraham, in particular, we respect for the level of chesed, kindness towards his fellow humans, which became his trademark. But it was Moses who set the highest standard for kindness towards others when he called for forgiveness of a people who were scarcely in a position to seek it for themselves and who were hardly deserving of it. And, of these three outstanding personalities, it was Moses alone who had the benefit of learning Torah. It was this that lifted his level of chesed to such a lofty level.

To return to our mishnah in Avot, derech eretz—the way we behave towards and with regard to others—may have considerable value even when it is without Torah. But it is the addition of the values of the Torah that enables its practitioners to maximise their performance of chesed and achieve the highest attainable level of kindness towards their fellow humans.