A good deed a day...

Take a look at the following propositions.

“He who finds a friend finds a treasure”.

“A good deed is never lost”.

“A person should do a good deed every day”.

“The true test of patience is how you act when you are impatient”.

“A person without ethics is like a vessel without contents”.

“Kindness is the mark of a true leader, gentleness is the mark of a true warrior”.

“Treat the present as if it were the last moment. Make it count”.

“It is easier to carry a mountain on one’s shoulder than to be humble”.

“Freedom is the most precious thing in life. The wise man must sacrifice everything in order to avoid being enslaved”.

These are all wise observations or words of guidance for anyone seeking to live a good life. They have something else in common. None of them will be found in Pirkei Avot.

 If these statements are not found in Avot, why am I listing them here? The answer is that they have all been attributed to Avot in an online publication, GB Times, in an article by Olivia Moore titled “A Hundred Jewish Proverbs to Enrich Your Life” (here). Each of them is accompanied by an apparently authentic but actually quite erroneous reference to a mishnah or baraita from Avot.

The statements listed above are all capable of being construed in accordance with the words of our sages. Some resonate with teachings from Avot and might be described as generalisations or paraphrases based upon them. At least one of them has a source in Jewish literature: you won’t find “He who finds a friend finds a treasure” at its quoted source, Avot 6:6—the baraita that lists the 48 ways of acquiring Torah—but you will find it in Ben Sira (a.k.a. Ecclesiasticus) 6:14. Others may be traced to other traditions. Thus “A good deed is never lost” will not be found at its stated location in Avot 4:17 but in the writings of St Basil of Cappadocia (330-379 CE).

I am at a loss to understand the objective of this exercise. The statements listed above could just have easily been published without the attribution of any sources. Avot is already the go-to place for people who want to sound wise when quoting something but don’t know where it comes from. The most frequent example of this is the aphorism derech eretz kodmah leTorah (“good behaviour precedes the Torah”), which comes from midrash sources. Another example is Talmud Torah keneged kulam (meaning that the study of Torah is of equivalent value to the aggregated performance of all other mitzvot), from Shabbat 127a; Pe’ah 1:1.  Is it just sloppiness, indifference, or a need to sound more scholarly than one is?