"You can't judge a book by looking at the cover"

You can't judge an apple by looking at a tree
You can't judge honey by looking at the bee
You can't judge a daughter by looking at the mother
You can't judge a book by looking at the cover

These lyrics, popularized by Bo Diddley, the Rolling Stones and many other performers, embody the teaching of Rabbi Meir at Avot 4:27:

אַל תִּסְתַּכֵּל בְּקַנְקַן, אֶלָּא בְּמַה שֶּׁיֶּשׁ בּוֹ, יֵשׁ קַנְקַן חָדָשׁ מָלֵא יָשָׁן, וְיָשָׁן שֶׁאֲפִילוּ חָדָשׁ אֵין בּ

Don’t look at the vessel, but at what’s inside it. There are new vessels that are filled with old wine, and old vessels that do not even contain new wine.

I recently had an opportunity to put this teaching into practice. Browsing the shelves of Jerusalem’s iconic Pomeranz bookshop, I came across a commentary on Pirkei Avot that had previously escaped my attention: Jewish Ethical Wisdom From Pirkei Avot by Rabbi Dov Peretz Elkins (Mazo Publishers, 2020). Unable to resist the temptation, I bought it.

My initial feeling about this book was not positive, since I started with the preliminaries. The front cover reminded me that the Americans and the English may share many common cultural characteristics—but they take quite a different view of self-promotion. As a generalization, Americans are very much more confident in their promotion of goods and services while the English are diffident and hide behind a wall of understatement. Neither approach reflects the Maimonidean norm that lies between the stridently boastful and the unhelpfully uninformative, but this book definitely falls on the American side of this border.

The cover eye-catchingly declares that this book is “The Only Pirkei Avot Edition According to Topic Themes”.  While there are not many Avot books that take this line, this one is not actually unique in that regard--even though four of this book’s five distinguished endorsers also seem to think it is. Torah Dynamics: Pirkei Avot Looks at Life, by Samson Krupnick and Morris Mandel, published in 1991, arranges its discussion of Avot under 24 topic headings. Then there is Rabbi Dan Roth’s Relevance: Pirkei Avos for the Twentieth Century (2007), which tackles topics while running them in the order they appear in Avot. Both are currently available on the Feldheim website and I wonder how these two books could have escaped everyone’s attention.

Now for the author. Rabbi Elkins is clearly a prolific author: the brief bio that faces the  Contents page describes him as having written over 55 books, no mean achievement. One of these, Chicken Soup for the Jewish Soul, made the New York Times bestseller list, and the cover itself proclaims Rabbi Elkins to be “Winner of the National Jewish Book Award”, which indeed he was in 1965 with Worlds lost and found; discoveries in Biblical archeology. Both these books are actually co-authored. The Englishman and the intellectual property lawyer in me are both uncomfortable with the absence of any mention here of co-authorship, but I imagine that this is something that troubles me more than it troubles others.

Anyway, once we get past these preliminaries, there’s still the book to consider. The first thing one can say about it is that it is highly accessible and easy to read. The text, including the footnotes, benefits from a large, clear font. It’s not a long work—just 160 pages inclusive of glossary and a short bibliography—and it spans over 30 focal topics. Most of these topics are covered in brief but one, Learning and Teaching, is disproportionately long, thus fairly reflecting the content of Avot itself.

Rabbi Elkins’ approach in general uses the mishnayot of Avot as a series of springboards from which to jump into issues that are of current interest or social relevance. He does so by drawing on quotations which span a wide variety of sources both religious and secular, which he deploys in order to elucidate points that are often based on his own experiences. Readers may not all feel happy at the choice of sources whose quotes appear, but this book is not addressed to readers who would rather take offence at the identity of a quoted source than give thought to the words quoted (cited authors Rabbis Louis Jacobs and Yitz Greenberg, both of whom have been known to raise the occasional hackle).

The content, length and drift of each essay make them collectively a handy reference point for anyone who finds him- or herself called upon to prepare a short and lively devar Torah. Also, with its tendency to prick consciences gently rather than destroying readers completely, as do some tomes on Avot, it’s probably a useful book to take with you to shul on the High Holy Days, to peruse when the going gets heavy and one’s concentration flags.

This work does not pretend to be a state-of-the-art scholarly treatise with doctoral pretensions, and that is a valuable selling point. While sages and scholars may write books of more lasting value, books written by congregational rabbis for ordinary people have a great advantage. A minister who is in daily contact with regular folk can usually be relied upon to have a firm grasp of their dreams and aspirations, their peeves and their foibles. Potential readers of books on Avot are not all striving to be saints or holy ascetics, but many of them would like to be better people if they could—and if someone could give them a few words of encouragement and advice. Books like this one, which talks of anger, doubt, friendship and responsibility, will always have a market and can do much good.

To conclude, I’m glad I didn’t judge this book by the cover and I’m sure that there are many people out there in the big wide world who will appreciate it.

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