The modern trend in commentaries in Avot is go look beyond the details and go for the big picture. Particularly where the Mishnah is a difficult one, it is tempting to identity a large moral precept or practical message and not waste the busy reader’s time with minutiae. In a world where Jewish ethical teaching has to fight it out with slogans, soundbites and punchy one-liners, this approach is quite explicable. But it can still be immensely rewarding to dig deep and see what we can mine from a close analysis of details that are both easy and attractive to miss.
Here's an example. At Avot 2:7 Hillel teaches:
אַף הוּא רָאָה גֻּלְגֹּֽלֶת
אַחַת שֶׁצָּֽפָה עַל פְּנֵי הַמָּֽיִם, אָמַר לָהּ: עַל דְּאַטֵּפְתְּ
אַטְּפוּךְ, וְסוֹף מְטַיְפָֽיִךְ יְטוּפוּן
[Hillel] also saw a skull
floating upon the water. He said to it: Because you drowned others, you were
drowned; and those who drowned you will themselves be drowned.
1. As a preliminary point, the postulate that every murder
victim must have been a murderer himself and that his murderer will be murdered
in turn is untrue and is not borne out by fact (R’ Shimshon Raphael Hirsch, Chapters
of the Fathers: the Hirsch Pirkei Avos).
2. Unlike Hillel’s other mishnayot in Avot, this mishnah
does not appear to have been said in its entirety by Hillel. How do we know?
First, there is use of the third person singular (“He also saw …” and “he said
to it …”), suggesting that the mishnah is an episode in which Hillel’s sighting
of a skull and his actual words were seen and told over by someone else.
Secondly, while the words spoken by Hillel are in Aramaic, the text that
contextualizes those words is in Hebrew.
3. This mishnah is misplaced and seems to be in the wrong
chapter of Avot. In the first perek, Hillel is quoted on the subject of
negative outcomes and punishments for those who seek to gain advantage at the
expense of others or who wrongfully exploit their knowledge. But here in the
second perek, this Mishnah—with its apparent focus on retribution and death—is uncomfortably
sandwiched between its bedfellows. The mishnah that precedes it focuses mainly
on the personal qualities needed for learning and teaching Torah, while that
which follows it contrasts the benefits conferred by the Torah and its
spiritual values with the worries inherent in the material world.
4. One of Hillel’s maxims (Avot 2:4) is that you should not
say anything that can’t be understood if you intend it to be understood—but the
plain meaning of this Mishnah is not apparent.
5. Hillel also teaches that you should not judge others until
you are in their place (also Avot 2:4). But here Hillel’s comments on the skull
are entirely judgemental.
6. Even if Hillel was prepared to waste his words on
speaking to a skull, the rule against lo’eg larash (mocking the dead) would
make it highly improbable that he would be addressing words of Torah to it.
7. Almost every other time that water is mentioned in Avot other
than when recounting miracles, it is a metaphorical reference to the Torah. But
here the plain words do not appear to suggest any connection with the Torah.
8. Since the principle of middah keneged middah is so
well known, and so frequently taught elsewhere, that it seems strange that
Hillel should have sought so oblique a means of teaching it.
9. Hillel was a superb scholar, a celebrated teacher and an authoritative
rabbi. He was not however a prophet. How could he have known the chain of
events leading to the drowning of the owner of the skull, or be certain of the
continuity of that chain into the future? Rashi and others have suggested that
what Hillel saw was not a skull but a severed head, which Hillel recognized as
formerly belonging to a murderer who was killed by robbers. This explanation addresses
the past, but not the future.
10. Hillel, like all Tannaim, used words sparingly. Why then
would he deem it appropriate to deliver a soliloquy to a deceased person’s
insentient skull?
11. The basic meaning of the Aramaic word טוף (‘touf’), translated as “drown”, usually
means “float.”
12. Skulls do not float on water. This is something that can
be easily verified by experiment and would almost certainly have been within
Hillel’s own general knowledge since bones were used for a variety of purposes
in both Jewish and non-Jewish households during and after the Second Temple
period. For the record, the male skull
(3.88 gm per cubic centilitre) is nearly four times denser than water (1 gm per
cc) and the female skull has nearly three times its density (2.9 gm per cc).
Having shown that this Mishnah raises many problems, let us attempt
to address them.
1. Since Rabbi Yehudah HaNasi ('Rebbi') located this mishnah in the second chapter of
Avot, in the context of the neighbouring mishnayot that address the teaching and learning of Torah,
we may infer that this mishnah too is on the same topic.
2. While there is no explicit mention of Torah and learning
in this mishnah, the well-known use of the concept of water as a metaphor for
Torah provides the key to our understanding that this mishnah too relates to
Torah study.
3. The word which is usually translated or understood as
“drown” literally means “float.” The skull in this mishnah is therefore neither
drowned nor drowning—but floating on the surface of the Torah.
4. The symbolism of the skull can be explained by one of its
most obvious characteristics: it is a bone which is empty and therefore devoid
of a brain – the organ of thought and, significantly here, the only organ
through which Torah can be learned (per R’ Ya’akov Emden).
5. Putting this all together, we have the scenario of a
person who lacks brainpower that enables him to plumb the depths of Torah
wisdom; he is therefore condemned to float forever on the surface, gaining only
a superficial surface view of the Torah and its teachings.
6. The action to which Hillel refers in this scenario is
that the would-be scholar who lacks the intellectual power to understand the
profundities of Torah has “caused others to float” by taking their teachings
only at face value. This means in turn that those who absorb his shallow
teachings will not be able to gravitate towards the Torah’s deeper meanings
when they too teach future talmidim; this process will be destined to continue
unabated into the future.
This reading of our mishnah as being entirely divorced from
the drowning of villains may seem somewhat startling. It does however have
several advantages. To name but a few, it eliminates the need to address the
fact that there is no basis in reality for the propositions that those who are
murdered must themselves be murderers and that those who murdered them will be
murdered too. It also relieves us of the need to cast Hillel in the sort of
judgemental role which he urges others to avoid. In the context of a metaphor
employed as a teaching aid for the talmidim sitting at his feet, Hillel’s words
would also have passed the instant comprehensibility test. Further, it eliminates
any lo’eg larash problems caused by Hillel speaking words of Torah to
someone who is dead.
What might have inspired Hillel to employ a metaphor of this
nature? Again, we may never know. However, Hillel was not the only Tanna of
Avot to use this teaching technique. We find that his teacher Avtalyon did so
too, comparing the learning of poorly- or erroneously-taught Torah to the act
of drinking polluted (literally “evil”) water: to imbibe such water would be
fatal, causing desecration of the name of God (Avot 1:11. R’ Ya’akov Emden also
makes this connection, at Avot 2:7). It may be no coincidence that Hillel was
proud of the fact that he had learned his Torah from Avtalyon and Shemayah,
whom Hillel described as “the two greatest men of the time” (Pesachim 66a).
We still have to offer a reason why this mishnah should have
come to Rebbi in its unusual form with Hillel’s own words, in Aramaic, being
introduced and contextualized by someone else speaking in Hebrew. While we may
never know, it is tempting to hypothesize that Hillel was giving a shiur
to his talmidim in Aramaic. In this shiur he sought to explain the importance
of deep-rooted and firmly-based Torah learning and that he employed the analogy
of the skull (i.e. the brainless head) bobbing around on the top of the water (i.e.
Torah), warning of the consequences of remaining with learning that is
literally superficial. Maybe he asked his talmidim to visualize this metaphor.
Over the generations that separated Hillel from his distant descendant Rebbi,
the metaphor so powerfully taught by Hillel became a Hebrew language narrative
in which Hillel featured – and Rebbi, having understood this teaching in its
original sense, placed it in the second chapter of Avot among Hillel’s
observations on Torah, rather than in the first chapter along with another of
his more retributionary statements. In the ensuing years, the underlying meaning
of this teaching was either forgotten or replaced by explanations based on the
principle of middah keneged middah.
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