Get ahead, get a skull

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.

This mishnah raises so many issues that it is unsurprising that many commentators prefer to explain it simply as an example of the principle of middah keneged middah: as you do to others, so shall things be done to you. But a close examination of the text shows that this approach is fraught with difficulties. In particular:

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.